What to Feed Orioles...and What NOT to Feed

This is an unusual sight: a Baltimore oriole eating sunflower chips with a cardinal. Another unusual sight: the same oriole, eating peanuts!

But then, this is an unusual spring. April was terrible: cold and wet. I had high hopes for May, but it was 38 at wakeup this morning, May 6, in southeast Ohio, and the birds are hurting. I lay awake all night figuring out ways to help them. I've got to go on another Zickpotition to feed baby bluebirds in their boxes today. My third such trip this nesting cycle. I hate that I have to do that, but it's that or clean the dead little ones out of my boxes, and that I really don't want to do. 

When it's cold and wet, bluebirds and other insectivores have a terrible time finding enough food for their young. So I help. If you haven't seen the video yet, click here: http://tinyurl.com/zicklife

These orioles are migrants, and they normally make their living like this. Here, he's spreading apart a dead leaf wad with his opened bill, looking for caterpillars or spiders. 

But in this craptastic weather, the orioles are forced to mooch. 

I had literally two tiny Clementines in the house when they blew in. 

 Do you like my oriole orange feeder? It was a gift from my sweet dear friend Kim Beard, last October. It happens to have a prong on it that works for impaling a small orange. :) 

The wee clementines were disappearing fast. So as I lay awake all night, it occurred to me that the orioles might accept grapefruit. And they did, though they shake their heads at the sourness. This is a young male, who still has some olive-brown immature plumage around his eyes.

The first thing I did when I got up this morning was make a double batch of Zick Dough. Here's the recipe: 

Zick Dough Improved

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup lard (can be bought in large tubs at Walmart)

Melt the fats together in microwave until liquid. 

Combine dry ingredients: 

2 cups chick starter (make sure it's unmedicated; available at feed store)

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup flour

Add melted fats and stir until crumbly. Does not need refrigeration. Serve in hanging plexi dome feeder so it stays dry. Serve in winter, or during unseasonably cold spells in spring and summer. It is too rich for a steady diet and can possibly cause issues with gout, but it's great for pulling birds through hard times. So feed sparingly, and only when needed.

Here's a hanging plexi dome feeder I got at White's Mill in Athens OH. Has a screen bottom so water won't collect, and an adjustable dome so you can keep starlings out by lowering it so only cute little natives like this female downy woodpecker can wiggle in. Such an awesome little feeder! 

While I was lying awake this morning, I got this idea that I might entice the orioles to take higher-quality fare than orange pulp by using a little birdy psychology. So as soon as the batch had set, I stuffed an exhausted Clementine skin with fresh warm ZickDough.

The older male oriole came down, tasted it, and approved. I was squealing with joy from inside my studio blind. 

 Along came the young male. Whatcha got there? (This is how birds learn: by observing each other). And old boy says, "Nothing you'd want! Mine!"

When an older female dropped in, she was attracted to the Clementine, but didn't consider ZickDough fit for consumption. You can see her spreading her mandibles, trying to get down past the dough to the fruit pulp. Oh well. Two out of three ain't bad. 

Between the ZickDough and the grapefruit, I've got them covered until I can get some big navel oranges today. I also ordered 3,000 mealworms from thenaturesway.com , my favorite supplier of mealworms. Tell Tim Vocke that Zick sent you!

(I don't normally feed mealworms to the birds in my yard. But in a spring like this one, they can make the difference between life and death for nestlings).

You will notice that I am NOT feeding grape jelly to these birds. I do not consider straight grape jelly a fit food for any wild bird. It is practically pure refined sugar, full of artificial color, and not a fit food for any bird.  I hope that if you are feeding grape jelly to orioles you will stop and consider my warning. I've been rehabilitating and experimenting with feeding wild birds since 1982, and I would never, ever feed straight processed grape jelly to one of my clients. If I did, I'd expect to see it keel over from liver damage in short order.

You will see a lot of people recommending feeding jelly to orioles. This is classic anthropocentric behavior. I enjoy it, so I do it. I don't even think about whether it's good for the birds. It brings them in, they like it, and that's enough for me. Well, just because a bird will eat something doesn't mean they SHOULD eat it.

No, there aren't any studies as yet to prove me right, but you can ask any avian dietitian if they'd feed jelly to orioles. You'd get an "absolutely NOT!" And neither are there targeted studies to back up the assertion that Red Dye #40, as found in artificial hummingbird "food," is harmful, and I think there's now solid agreement on that score (except from the manufacturers who continue to make money on it).

For more information on that, see my blogpost, Red Alert for Hummingbirds.

And, at the risk of making this post a real linkfarm, I wanted to let you know that I'll be raising money for monarch butterfly research this Saturday, May 9! Mark Garland, my dear friend from Cape May, NJ, has asked me to bird around my home and contribute my sightings to his Virtual World Series of Birding team, The Monarchists. We have an AMAZING team of 15 people. They are: 

Lu Ann Daniels, Ron Rollet, Elle McGee, Bert Hixon, Michael O-Brien, Louise Zemaitis, Meg Hedeen, Mark Garland, Dick Walton, Erik Bruhnke, Drew Lanham, me, Seth Benz, Geoff Heeter, and Scott Weidensaul. 

Talk about good company! If you'd like to contribute to our knowledge and research on monarch butterfly migration, you can donate a per-bird amount (any amount is fine! A penny! Whatever!) at this link: 

https://www.worldseriesofbirding.org/teampage.asp?fundid=1485

Thank you, as always, for reading and enjoying this wonderful spring with me.

Real Life, Served Hot

When you see a sopping wet gobbler walking on a new-mown path, you know there's been too much rain. Wild turkeys hate hard rain. They hate getting their feathers soaked, for good reason--they can get chilled and die. So they resort to meadows and even lawns--anywhere they can go and not brush up against wet vegetation--when it's cold and rainy. I know to look for them in the meadow on such mornings, and am often rewarded.

It's especially nice when they come close to the deck, and I can creep ever so softly out and photograph them through the railings. Nice beard on this one. It's the height of turkey season here now, and there are more hunters in the woods than usual because they're bored and not working. I'm sure any hunter would like to bag this gobbler as a trophy. It seems so dumb to me,  get all excited about how long a turkey's beard is,  or how long his leg spurs are, but people do what they do. They're always counting coup on wildlife, lying in wait and calling them up, spreading corn in the woods, trying to kill them, then setting up ways to measure how "good" a gobbler is. To me, if he's out there and alive, he's good. He's no good dead, unless you're hungry. He won't get shot on my 80 acres, if everyone behaves himself.

I'd no sooner finished photographing this gent than another showed up on the other side of the meadow. Phoebe spotted him and sent me scrambling to get in position again.

You can see he's got a livid red engorged wattle, so he's probably been displaying down in the woods. 

He was headed for Bill's grave, which is the dark patch to the right, and backed by a blizzard of dogwood, and he stopped to gobble right there! If you click on the photo you can see the gobble posture: head thrown forward, a little awkwardly.

I like this shot because it says so much. The dogwoods tell you it's late April. The lone pine where Bill decided he wanted to rest. His grave to the left. And in the foreground, a crummy looking little shrub. That's got a story to it, too. The whole time we were living here, Bill was buggin' me about digging a pond out in the meadow. He wanted a pond smack dab in the middle of the meadow so he could watch for ducks and solitary sandpipers and yellowlegs and snipe and the like. Bill was a goal-oriented birder. 

Our argument hinged on the inescapable fact that this pond would be at the high point of a dry ridge. I told him, again and again, that I had no desire to look at a dry hole or a mud puddle, because I could guarantee that thing was gonna dry up every summer. Where's the runoff? I'd ask. 

So he had a test hole dug by our friend Mr. Crum when he was out here doing some bobcatting with his little dozer. And it holds water...sometimes. In spring. Some springs. And because you can't mow a hole, some shrubs sprang up and there they are to this day. With a hole. With a few inches of water at the bottom. That, I guess, is Bill's pond. That's as far as he got. I'm frankly glad it isn't a couple acres big with shrubs all around it. That's what I'm glad of. You can't mow a hole.

I've been watching jays. I have a lot of jays this spring. I watch them like some kind of addled eagle, all day long (when I'm at my desk). Because if I watch long enough, I might catch something like this.

On the right is a known jay from 2017 that I named Little Bit. See the little flash of white at the primary coverts? Unique. Nobody else has that.

In this shot, you can see the little bit of spangled white on Little Bit's brow, if you click on the photo.

I was under the impression that Little Bit was a male. In 2018, I had photographed it making a call that I thought was the male jay's "squeaky gate" call. 

Apparently not. Because LIttle Bit is getting fed by her mate here. I about fell over. Data points. Gathering them like a jay gathers acorns, all the time. Storing them away. Hoping to learn something. Learning every minute.

The real point of this post is to show you something wonderful. In mid-April, I answered a plaintive call from Geoff Heeter at the New River Birding and Nature Festival, based in Fayetteville, West Virginia. I have given a keynote without fail every Friday of that festival for the last 18 years. EIGHTEEN YEARS. I look forward to it sooo much. I love the festival, its organizers, Opossum Creek Resort (where it's held). I love the birds and mountains and wildlife. I love being around my old friends and making new ones. I love taking my dog, whether Chet or Curtis, to charm and entertain the people who come. Last year was Curtis' debut and he did not disappoint. 

I also love the fact that the festival raises money for an education fund that brings nature education into Fayette County schools. I really love that. 

But the festival had to be canceled this year, and we all hated that. 

Geoff wanted me to do a virtual keynote. Uh oh. I am real good at real life, at showing up and entertaining people. I am not good at virtual life, unless you count this blog as virtual...

So I thought about it, and decided to take my phone along and set it on VIDEO and just record a normal Zick morning on the bluebird box trail. 

And amazing stuff started to happen. 

One after another, amazing things happened. Was it because I was recording? Was it because life is just amazing, and when you make a video of it, you realize how jam-packed it is? I'm not sure, but I am so glad Geoff Heeter asked me to do this. Even though it took me most of a week to collect, edit, string them together, make transitions, and then consult with my kids to figure out how to present them in a goof-proof way for my "virtual keynote." Which actually came off without too much of a hitch, as long as you don't count the entire day I spent freaking out before we figured out how to put them all on a YouTube playlist for easy access. Virtual anything...bleh. These videos though...YAY!

Without further ado, I refer you to a series of five very short videos. Clicking this link will play them all in order. And you won't be sorry. It's a Day in the Life, Zick Style.

http://tinyurl.com/zicklife

Skunk Self-Care--and That Smell!

One of the signs that an animal is feeling well is self-care. That's funny. One of the signs that a person is feeling well is self-care.  I admit to falling off a bit in self-care of late. My hair is driving me nuts, going full-on Bozo with giant sidewings, as I've missed two cuts with my beloved and gifted stylist Angie. I bought barrettes, then headbands. Neither accoutrement has been used on my head for 23 years at least. And neither works on my wild in-between hair, to keep it out of my eyes. Finally, in desperation, I took some tiny butterfly hairclips that I use to secure orchid blooming stems to their stakes. My head is studded with them, each one holding back an obstreperous hank of hair, and I look like Pebbles Bedrock, but it works and I can forget about my hair and get on with my work.  I tell myself it's youthful and perhaps kind of cute, but it's really just pathetic. Oh well. Nobody but my kids sees it, and at least I have enough hair to annoy me. Be thankful for what you have.

          

You may watch this video and think that SugarBean has fleas. Far from it. This is simply grooming, all the scratching and chewing and licking. What a privilege, to kneel on a terrace directly over a wild skunk, and see how he conducts his toilette. What a thrill, to be trusted, and to trust him. This stink bomb he carries colors every interaction. There's always that chance that something could scare him and I could be drenched. But the longer we know each other, the more distant that likelihood is.

In my years as a dog owner, I've had to deskunk a dog five times. Five times too many. It's one of my least favorite chores. I did it twice for Chet in 12 years, and three times for Curtis in the first eight months I had him! There are lots of folks who are just signing onto SugarBean's story via various Web channels, and it seems that some have missed the two previous posts that explain how it is that my hunting dog Curtis isn't attacking this little black and white yard fixture. Here's the first one: Fun With Skunks and Dogs  and here's the second one: About That Skunk.  Thanks to having SugarBean around, I've had the opportunity to teach Curtis to leave him alone, and that is a beautiful thing. I DID find Curtis cleaning up SugarBean's dinner one day, then STICKING HIS HEAD IN THE MAILBOX where the skunk was sleeping, so I wouldn't say we are exactly home free, but both skunk and dog are champs, and I have to trust the process and the intelligence of both animals. My devotion to one injured skunk has been tested and found true.

While deskunking Curtis, I have given a lot of thought to the absolutely jaw-dropping power of skunkstink, N-butyl mercaptan. As much as I've smelled it, it still amazes me that one animal, smaller than your average housecat, can pack a couple little sacs full of oil that, when deployed, you can smell for literally MILES. And you can't smell it until he lets it loose. How on earth does he confine that stench with nothing more than flesh and a sphincter? It all amazes me and makes me wonder. I found this bizarre little video on the Net that shows the two "nozzles" that pop out on either side of a skunk's anus that fire and even direct the spray! I hope never to be that close! And having been sprayed myself twice (never a direct hit, such as Curtis takes, but damn close), I will say that skunk scent, point blank, is the only smell that actually terrifies me. It's such a primal response.

Yesterday, the kids thought it would be funny to take Curtis' toy skunk, Snoutnose**, and place it in the bluebell patch, where I would see it out of the corner of my eye as I chugged out to fill the bird feeders. I did and...zero at the bone! Stopped in my tracks! If I ever had doubt that the black and white pelage of a skunk is a primal fear releaser, it is gone now. And even after going on two months of fraternizing with sweet lil' SB, I still get that chill when I first spot him on his afternoon peregrination. Once sprayed, twice shy. I'm fascinated by this visceral response to seeing him that persists even though my conscious mind knows he's "safe." And I suspect that the frisson of knowing that I could get sprayed adds to my enjoyment of being his friend. It has been pointed out to me that I like to live dangerously.

**a gift from my sweet friend Marianne!

Because one can never have too much of watching a skunk roll around on the ground, here's another sweet video from the same session on April 2. These were made with my iPhone from a ridiculously close range. Lookit that little face! And those nails. Just everything. The snorf. The belly, now much rounder than it was. The underlying white hairs in his tail. The way he norbles on his fur. Oooh this little animal, he's soo sweet.

        

With love from the edge,

JZ